The actress spoke to the late-night host about her 4-year-old daughter Hazel‘s “strange” reaction to seeing the Mary Poppins Returns trailer for the first time.

“Well, it’s funny. When I played the trailer for my daughter, for Hazel, she had my iPhone, and she was holding it like this with a completely impassive expression — just gave me nothing,” she said. Emily then mimicked Hazel’s monotone expression as she asked to watch the trailer over and over again. “It was as if she was checking, ‘Do I like it? Do I think it’s good? What am I supposed to do?‘”

Jimmy Kimmel and Emily Blunt’s families are pretty close — they vacation together, have dinner together, pull epic pranks on one another — and, it turns out, the actress has an incredible and hilarious mother, at least according to the late-night host.

During Blunt’s appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, Kimmel recounts a story about her mom, Joanna Mackie, whom the actress calls his “favourite person.”

“She really likes you. She reserves this compliment just for people she really likes, she goes, ‘Jimmy is such a honey, isn’t he?’” Blunt tells the audience as Kimmel shares an embarrassingly hilarious story about Mackie that involves a spaghetti dinner made by the actress.

“She takes a forkful of pasta and I notice that there’s a hair…One of your hairs, probably,” Kimmel says, recounting the dinner with the two families. “It was a little ‘Hairy Poppins’ in the pasta and your mother, without missing a beat, maintained eye contact with me and maintained a conversation with me and I could just out of peripheral vision see her wrapping the hair around her finger very neatly and then it disappeared.”

“I couldn’t wait to tell you about this,” Kimmel says.

“That makes me feel a bit sick, actually,” Blunt replies, miming pulling a hair out of her mouth. “You’re her kid. You’ve probably thrown up in her mouth,” he adds.

After confirmation of her cover for the magazine, we finally have our first look at Emily Blunt’s Vogue US shoot for the December issue. Co-star Lin-Manuel Miranda also features in the editorial, which shows both in character for their upcoming project Mary Poppins Returns.

PRECISELY WHAT IS MARY POPPINS? We know her to be a humanoid who does not age, is capable of tele­kinesis, is not constricted by the ordinary bounds of time, space, and gravity, and flies through the air with the aid of an umbrella, albeit in upright, duck-footed fashion. She is stern, fastidious, and speaks with a posh accent, but enjoys vaguely romantic relationships with common laborers. She is beloved by children and former children the world over, yet is, when contemplated at an intellectual distance, utterly unknowable, even bizarre.

“She’s a superhero,” says Emily Blunt without hesitation. “You could say she’s some sort of angel. She recognizes what people need, and she gives it to them, yet they discover something about themselves in the process.” With a rather Mary Poppins–like firmness, Blunt concludes, “I don’t think she concerns herself with what she is. There’s nobody else like her—which she quite likes.”

In ripped vintage blue jeans and a ruffled black velvet blouse by Frame, her hair blonde, Blunt does not bear much physical resemblance to Mary Poppins when I meet with her in early autumn, at a loft in lower Manhattan that she and her husband, the actor and director John Krasinski, use as an office. But in her rapid yet thoughtful response to my question, Blunt reveals how much consideration she has given to her starring role in next month’s Mary Poppins Returns.

And no wonder: Blunt has her work cut out for her. From the moment in the film when the character hovers into view—“As I live and breathe!” says an awed Lin-Manuel Miranda, playing Mary’s lamplighter friend Jack, admiring the supernormal caregiver’s emergence from the parting clouds—there has to be instant buy-in, not a moment of disbelief. The person portraying Mary Poppins in 2018 has to be—oh, what was that phrase on the magic tape measure?—practically perfect in every way.

This is because, for most of us, Mary Poppins has always been Julie Andrews, who made her screen debut in the 1964 original, winning an Oscar in the process. That film remains a canonical piece of American popular art, visually extravagant and full of unforgettable songs by the brothers Richard and Robert Sherman (“A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Feed the Birds [Tuppence a Bag],” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”). It’s a hell of a legacy to contend with—and Blunt knew that she was in for something big when she received a phone call of an uncommonly “ceremonious nature,” as she puts it, from Rob Marshall, the sequel’s director, in the summer of 2015. The two had worked together a couple of years earlier on Into the Woods, Marshall’s film adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim–James Lapine stage musical, and had developed an easy rapport.

This time, Blunt felt a different energy coming from Marshall, as if he were building up to a marriage proposal. Which he sort of was. After a long preamble in which he explained that he and John DeLuca, his partner in both his personal and professional lives, were closing in on an opportunity to work on a dream project—all the while withholding what the project was—Marshall finally let drop what he was talking about: another Mary Poppins. The original was the first film Marshall ever saw, with his parents at a theater in downtown Pittsburgh, when he was four years old. For the better part of his adult life, he had harbored a fantasy of making a sequel to it.

“Rob basically said, ‘If you don’t want to do this with us, we are going to find something else, because we won’t do it if you don’t want to,’ ” Blunt says.

“For me, there was no one else but Emily,” Marshall confirms. “There wasn’t even a possible other choice. She’s rare in this world because she’s incredibly warm and funny, and has a great deal of vulnerability as well. And at the same time, she’s British and can sing and dance.”

Blunt agreed on the spot. Only later did she consider the risks involved. Actually, there was a bit of a prompt for this: She told a friend about the pending project, and the friend remarked, “Oof, you’ve got balls of steel!”

“And then I remember a feeling of slight panic creeping in,” Blunt says.

AND WHAT OF MIRANDA, for whom Mary Poppins Returns would be his first major undertaking after departing the Broadway cast of his own Hamilton, the show that seismologically changed his life? And whose new character, Jack the lamplighter—or leerie, to use the Anglo-Scottish term preferred in the film—bears the weight of being both a protégé and heir to Dick Van Dyke’s beloved, chim-chimneying Bert?

“Were you leery of playing a leerie?” I ask Miranda in a Brooklyn café.

“I was not leery of playing a leerie, nor was I weary of playing a leerie. It was eerieto play a leerie,” Miranda replies.

“But did it get teary, playing a leerie?”

“It did,” Miranda says. “There are dreams you have when you’re a kid, and then there’s the notion that Mary Poppins would have a sequel someday and you could somehow possibly be in it. And if I had said that this was a dream of mine, you’d have been like, ‘What are you on?’

“I have a nod to the Sherman brothers in Hamilton, actually,” Miranda goes on. “In King George’s song, there’s a moment where he sings ‘Oceans rise, empires fall,’ and that’s a very Shermanesque move, to have the note go down on rise and up on fall—just like how the note goes up on the down in. . . .” He sings the line “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

Miranda began his Poppins prep by watching the ’64 movie for the first time since his boyhood. “It’s so timeless and weirdly resonant,” he says. “I mean, one of the first numbers is ‘Sister Suffragette,’ a men-are-stupid, voting-rights-for-women song”—sung by Glynis Johns as Mrs. Banks, the mother of the children to whom Mary Poppins ministers—“so that’s fantastic. And then the visual and musical sequences are as magical as anything you’d see in a movie today.”

Blunt took a different tack. Banishing her self-doubt, she made the executive decision not to rewatch the ’64 film, which she, too, had last seen in childhood. “I knew that if I watched Julie Andrews’s version, maybe I would take the edge off of what my instincts were telling me to do,” Blunt says. “Also, I didn’t want to be completely intimidated by the brilliance of her voice.”

Before Into the Woods, Blunt had done little in the way of professional singing, though she was not unmusical growing up. She played the cello as a child, and at Hurtwood House, the boarding school that she attended in her teens in England, she starred as Adelaide in a production of Guys and Dolls and performed in a four-girl vocal group. “We’d sing things like TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’—crushed it,” she says.

Still, there was some collective nervousness to be overcome. The film’s composers, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray, Smash), grappled with how “certifiably insane” it was to try to measure up to the Sherman brothers’ work. “And then, on top of that,” Shaiman says, “what could be more wonderfully torturous than ‘Let’s write songs for Lin-Manuel Miranda’?”

Blunt, Miranda, Shaiman, and Wittman all happen to be based in New York, and so, in the spring of 2016, the four regularly convened in a Chelsea studio. “We got to tailor the songs for Emily and Lin, make them bespoke,” Wittman says. For instance: The songwriters came up with a comic duet titled “A Cover Is Not the Book” that gives Miranda an extended moment to spit rhymes in the breakneck style for which he is known—“For it’s not so cut and dried/Well, unless it’s Dr. Jekyll/Then you better hide, petrified!”—albeit not, thankfully, in the form of an anachronistic rap. Among the conventions of the British music-hall genre is the patter song, a Gilbert and Sullivan–style demonstration of vocal dexterity, “so we felt we could deliver that kind of moment for Lin without compromising the style of the movie, or its time and the place,” Shaiman says.

For Blunt, these sessions served a therapeutic purpose. She was in the process of finishing up The Girl on the Train, in which she played a depressive voyeur, and was also heavily pregnant with the second of her two daughters with Krasinski, Violet, who is now two. (Their older girl, Hazel, is four.) “It was medicinal, singing these happy Mary Poppins songs after what I’d been through every day,” she says. “Poor Violet; she’d been rattling around inside me while I played this alcoholic train wreck. But then I think she benefited from all the singing.”

SIX WEEKS AFTER VIOLET’S BIRTH, Marshall arranged for Blunt and Miranda to workshop the new songs for a week opposite trained Broadway actor-singers in a mid-Manhattan rehearsal space—with Blunt ducking out every so often to pump milk. (“Mary Pump–ins; that’s what I felt like,” she says. “It was ridiculous.”) Next up was three months of rehearsals in England before filming would begin. Blunt, who moved her whole family to London for the shoot, told Marshall she needed some time off. “I said, ‘You’ve got to give me four or five months before I’m ready to crack on with the rehearsals, for the baby.’ ”

The downtime allowed Blunt to immerse herself in both films’ original source material, the eight children’s books by P. L. Travers, the series’ Australian-born, London-based author (who was so notoriously protective of her literary creation that Disney devoted an entire feature film, 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks, to the difficulties the studio had in securing Travers’s blessing to make the original picture). In the books, the title character is severe and forbidding, with some antiheroic traits, such as overweening vanity (“Mary Poppins was very vain and tried to look her best. Indeed, she was quite sure that she never looked anything else”) and a steadfast refusal to discuss her inner life (“Mary Poppins never told anybody anything”).

No surprise then, that the Mary Poppins that emerged from Blunt’s preparations is more tart, clipped, and expressly comic than Andrews’s—“closer to Dorothy Parker, or Katharine Hepburn in those thirties screwball movies, with a bit of Gene Wilder’s Wonka in there,” as Miranda puts it. Blunt says she drew inspiration from Rosalind Russell’s rat-a-tat speech cadences as the bulldog reporter Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawks’s screwball masterwork, His Girl Friday, and from the peculiar, frozen-in-the-thirties locutions of Princess Margaret, which she describes as “incredibly posh and quite strange, yet very light and well placed.”

The thirties, it so happens, were when the first two Poppins books were published, and there are glancing allusions within them to the financial hardships of “the Great Slump,” as the Depression was known in Britain. Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane, home to the Banks family, is the only house on the street “that is rather dilapidated and needs a coat of paint.” Walt Disney chose to transpose the first film’s action to the more manifestly merrie Edwardian era, circa 1910. But Marshall and the new film’s screenwriter, David Magee, decided to stay true to the author’s 1930s setting.

Their big departure was to leap ahead into the next generation. Jane and Michael Banks, played with tender sincerity and maximum adorableness by the moppet actors Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber in 1964, are now played by Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw. While Jane retains her spark, picking up her mother’s activist mantle (though her cause is organized labor), Michael is in the dumps. He is the father of three little Bankses, Annabel, John, and Georgie, but he is a recent widower, an unfulfilled bank employee, a creatively stunted artist, and a man so hopeless with finances that the very bank where both he and his father have worked is now threatening to repossess Number Seventeen—a suite of unfortunate circumstances that serves as the magical-nanny equivalent of a Bat-Signal.

All that said, what Marshall and Magee have not done is go down the well-trod path of the dark, dystopian franchise reboot; this is not Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Nanny. If anything, Mary Poppins Returns is remarkably faithful to the spirit of its predecessor. “The sequel sort of rhymes with the original,” says Miranda.

There is, once again, a bravura animated sequence, executed in the vintage hand-drawn Disney style, for which Marshall coaxed some veteran animators out of retirement. There are vibrant costumes, this time by Sandy Powell, that stand out against the London gray: caped, fitted overcoats in red and blue for Mary; knits in bright lime and Kelly green for Jane and Michael; bankers’ suits in irregular chalk stripes for Colin Firth (the film’s villain, devilishly cunning and wearing a Snidely Whiplash mustache) and his flunkies.

There is a visit by Mary Poppins and the children to a daffy relative of Mary’s, though this time it’s not Ed Wynn as Uncle Albert, whose levity literally made him levitate, but Meryl Streep as Cousin Topsy, done up in carrot-colored hair and chartreuse eye shadow, madly gallivanting about her fix-it shop, sometimes while upside down. There is—!!!—a hoofing 92-year-old Dick Van Dyke, echoing not his role as Bert but his other role, as the elderly banker Mr. Dawes. And Shaiman and Wittman have provided Miranda with his own “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” a gambol across London’s rooftops called “Trip a Little Light Fantastic.”

BY THE TIME filming began in London, in February of last year, the world was suddenly quite different from the one in which the plans for Mary Poppins Returns had been excitedly hatched. The unsettling outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election placed the making of the movie in a new perspective for its creators.

“It took on a new poignancy because of how volatile the times felt,” Blunt says. “I remember Meryl commenting on that, saying that coming in to work took on much more depth once things really started becoming more incendiary out there.”

“I couldn’t believe that, given all that was going on, this is what we got to put into the world,” says Miranda. “It’s so clichéd, but we got to make this enormous present, this beautiful, uplifting, joyous family movie that makes you cry, that made even my stone-hearted-scientist wife cry when she saw an early rough cut of it. I feel really grateful that that’s what we spent our year doing.”

LATE IN THE FILM, a character utters the words “I never thought I’d feel this much joy and wonder ever again”—about as unabashed a statement of a sequel’s intent as you’re ever likely to come across. To Marshall, I raise the question of whether such a sentiment will resonate with kids growing up in times like these—and whether they will be as responsive to Mary Poppins Returns as 1964 kids were to its forebear.

“It’s more important than ever that this film is out now,” he says emphatically. “Because kids are more cynical, and people are more cynical.” For the director, the lessons imparted by the Mary Poppins books and now the two movies amount to something resembling a wellness regimen, and one that bears propagating. “To be able to understand that the only way to get through life is to find, deep inside, that childlike wonder—I mean, that’s how I live,” Marshall says. “Without that, I would find the world an incredibly dark place. And I don’t feel old-fashioned saying that. To me, it’s a life choice.”

With the seal now unbroken, and the sacrosanctity of the ’64 film unviolated by its sequel, could this be the start of more Poppins screen adventures? The source material is not unlike that which fuels the James Bond movie franchise: a stack of lively books by an ornery British author concerning an iconic British character who neither grows old nor dies. So would the applicable parties be amenable to a return after Mary Poppins Returns?

Marshall, for now, is eager just to get the film out. “But I do know,” he adds, “that there’s a lot of material there and it’s very rich with all kinds of adventures and ideas. It’s certainly ripe for the picking.”

Blunt doesn’t hedge for a moment. “Oh, I would pay Rob to do it again with me. Yeah, I would. Definitely,” she says. “More stories left to tell.” There always are for superheroes.

Entertainment Weekly

“Everybody’s walking around with their cheeks a little pinker, and you just know that everybody…they’ve got a secret. They’ve got something really good under wraps until Christmas.”

That’s the picture Meryl Streep paints for EW of the set of Mary Poppins Returns, Disney’s high-stakes, high-magic sequel to the 1964 musical classic. Any number of elements from the original film — its indelible songs by Richard and Robert Sherman, its career-making performances by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, its significant strides in animated penguin awareness — have amounted to Mary Poppins being nothing less than a crown jewel for Disney for more than five decades. So it’s only natural that all eyes are now on the people entrusted with bringing Mary Poppins back to audiences this December — and as EW learned spending time with them for this week’s cover, the cast and filmmakers behind Mary Poppins Returns feel they’re sitting on a movie with more than a little shine of its own.

Sharing the cover of EW’s Holiday Preview, Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda sat down for a conversation about the biggest movie of their careers (and perhaps the most ambitious sequel of the year that doesn’t involve an Avenger). Blunt, 35, was director Rob Marshall’s first choice to inherit the role of magical nanny Mary Poppins — and Julie Andrews gave her approval as well — yet for Blunt, stepping into the iconic part required a stiff upper lip. “I did, going into this, [hear] the preamble of everyone turning to me — including a friend of mine who said, ‘You’ve got balls of steel’ — and I would just try to allow all of that to be white noise and really approach her as I would any other character,” recalls Blunt, who first began collaborating with Marshall on 2014’s Into the Woods. “The beauty of Rob is that he kept it intimate enough so that you don’t feel the bigness too much. We just focused on this story and these people and this moment.”

But Blunt allowed the gravity of Mary Poppins to seep in every once in a while, like when Dick Van Dyke came to set and serenaded her with “Jolly Holiday” between takes…or when she revisited the original film after wrapping (“I showed my oldest daughter and it was this incredible two-pronged emotion because I thought, ‘Thank God I didn’t watch this before I did the movie’”)…or when she visited Miranda backstage at Hamilton in 2015 — her third time doing so, yet the first since they had both signed on to the film. “The whole project was cloaked in a sense of protection, and by that time it had sunk in that it was happening,” she recalls. “It was becoming so deep in my bones that I was going to be doing this, and that first overwhelming rush of thrill and fear when I got offered this role had diluted to something quite real… and so I think it was exciting knowing that Lin and I were going to be playing cohorts and kindred spirits.” Miranda remembers that night just a bit differently: “That was a really stressful show,” he laughs. “I felt like I was auditioning for Mary Poppins, the person.”

Miranda’s Poppins character — Jack, a lamplighter and old friend to Mary and the Banks family — marks the performer’s first major role since creating and starring in Broadway’s Hamilton (look it up). Yet for his big debut, audiences will meet him solely as Lin-Manuel the actor, not Lin-Manuel the Pulitzer-winning writer (although his famous verbal dexterity is certainly on display in the film’s nine new songs, custom-written by Hairspray duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman). Miranda calls Poppins his “first big movie,” but acknowledges how unusual the film actually is from the typical big-movie experience. “The highs were so high, in terms of: ‘Today we’re dancing with penguins, tomorrow we’re dancing with Meryl Streep, the next day we’re biking in front of Buckingham Palace,’” Miranda laughs. “For me, coming from theater, the adrenaline source is having the audience there, and when you take that audience away, where is it? Where does that part come from? And you realize, it comes from ‘We’re never coming back to Buckingham Palace to get a second take.’ The adrenaline source is in getting it right in that moment.”

Elsewhere in EW’s deep Mary Poppins Returns carpet bag: another sit-down with director Marshall, who toured us around the film’s London set for EW’s first look last year. Marshall has shepherded movie-musicals to the screen like Chicago and Into the Woods, yet Poppins marks his first original musical and a passion project for the director, who assembled a veteran creative team (including Shaiman, Wittman, producer John DeLuca, and Finding Neverland screenwriter David Magee) to craft a new story from author P.L. Travers’ eight-book series. “I used myself as a barometer, honestly,” says Marshall, who cites 1964’s Mary Poppins as the first film he ever saw. “Just say I wasn’t involved at all. What would I want to see in this film? I knew I wanted to see an animation sequence in the hand-drawn 2D style. I knew I wanted to have those wonderful characters, Mary’s famously eccentric cousins, or uncles, or aunts. But the most important thing was an emotional story. I wanted to find something that you could connect with. When we chose to set it in the Depression era, it felt like today: people struggling to make ends meet, or in this case, to deal with a loss, which many families deal with. How do you move through that? We had to create a reason for Mary Poppins to come back after 54 years, and it had to be real.”

What Marshall and team came up with is a new tale set in the 1930s that reflects the economic hardship of London’s Great Slump. Mary Poppins finds herself revisiting Cherry Tree Lane to help a now-grown Jane (Emily Mortimer) and Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) raise Michael’s three children (Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, Joel Dawson) after the death of his wife. “They’ve also lost a sense of wonder and joy,” says Marshall. “And the theme that drove me — of finding that child alive inside you — was, to me, an important story to tell. We live in such a fragile time that we need this film. I certainly felt that I needed it. I needed to turn off the news and be launched into a magical world where wondrous things can happen still, and there’s hope.”

If Marshall’s wish comes true, Mary Poppins Returns might deliver some similar optimism to audiences this Christmas. It’s for that same reason that Streep, who sings and dances in the film as Topsy, Mary’s gravity-challenged cousin, calls the film a gift to the world. “I just can’t wait for people to see it,” gushes the actress. “I feel like we have this little secret all tied up in a bow. Why can’t we just give it to them today?”

As Mary Poppins would say: patience, Meryl Streep, patience.

Posted on November 9, 2018Written by adminComments Off on Mary Poppins Returns brings a wonder woman back to this week’s EW cover

“It’s unbelievable. I mean, I’ve never been here to Savannah,” John said arriving at the event. “I’ve always wanted to come, so there’s that, but then, this film festival is the way you want it to be. You want this type of energy, and the people who run it have done such a good job. It’s such a joyous occasion.”

Emily Blunt and John Krasinski attended a special BAFTA screening of their hit film A Quiet Place held at The Mayfair Hotel on Monday (October 8) in London, England.

The 38-year-old actor and director and Emily, first movie together was released back in March, and became the No. 1 movie at the box office for three consecutive weeks in the US.

“It was a terrifying prospect at first. I was very nervous about directing her because you want to look confident and be able to impress the person you love with your work,” John recently expressed about working with Emily. “You don’t want to let that person down or make them feel that maybe you’re not as talented as they might have hoped!”

“My life is such a joy, being a father and being able to share my success with Emily and building our family together,” John added.

The upcoming sequel to the 2018 hit movie is set to be released on May 15, 2020!

We finally have the first trailer for Mary Poppins Returns! For me, the sequel seems poised to capture the magic of the original, as it features brightly colored old-fashioned animation mixed with upbeat live-action musical numbers.

Emily Blunt steps into Julie Andrews’s timeless role as the titular nanny who drops into the lives of the children of the now-grown Michael and Jane Banks.

Life tip: Catch up on your chores before Mary Poppins commands you this Christmas. Or, conversely, don’t, and find that the banal things like bathtime will become brilliant when there’s a magical nanny around to help you discover the joy in the job.

Eighty-four years after writer P. L. Travers debuted the enigmatic nanny Mary Poppins on the page, and 54 years after Julie Andrews immortalized her onscreen in Disney’s 1964 classic, it’s now Emily Blunt, director Rob Marshall, and an all-star cast who are shepherding Mary Poppins back to Cherry Tree Lane for this winter’s Mary Poppins Returns (Dec. 19).

“There’s never been a moment when I’ve felt like I want to in any way re-do the original,” explains Marshall, who directed, among other movie-musicals, the Oscar-winning Chicago. “The thing that’s so mortifying is when people say it’s a remake. Never. No one could touch that,” he continues. “But can we continue the tradition of that storytelling with our own cast, with our own world, with our own sensibility? There’s so much more story to tell, and it’s because the character’s so great.”

It’s right back here on Cherry Tree Lane, some 25-odd years after the first film, that the story of Mary Poppins and the Banks family continues: An economic slump has claimed the Banks family home and a tragedy has claimed the wife of grown-up Michael (Ben Whishaw), leaving him, his three children, and sister Jane (Emily Mortimer) without much hope or happiness these days. That’s the jumping-off point for the vision of Marshall, producers John DeLuca and Marc Platt, and screenwriter David Magee.

In the filmmakers’ effort to embrace the 1964 film but stay true to the further adventures of Travers’ eight-book children’s series, “we felt it was important to not only reflect the depression era [of the books], but that there had to be a very important reason for Mary to come back,” says Marshall. “It had to be something true and real, and so in our film, Michael’s a young father who has three kids and has not only lost his wife, but because of the time period, has also lost his whole sense of wonder and joy and optimism.”

Enter the plausibly implausible Mary, who brings with her the kind of adventures you’d expect of the beloved nanny — not to mention the tunes, written by veteran songwriting team Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Mary charms the dread out of household chores (“In our film, taking a bath becomes a magical adventure,” says Marshall); introduces the Bankses to more of her eccentric relatives (like Meryl Streep’s oddball cousin Topsy); and kicks up her heels. In particular, Blunt and costar Lin-Manuel Miranda (who plays a street-smart, singing lamplighter) shine in one of the film’s showstopping numbers, “Trip a Little Light Fantastic,” a musical gambol through London, pictured exclusively above.

“She’s just such fun to play,” gushes Blunt, who took her principal Poppins inspiration from Travers’ novels and the film His Girl Friday. “I’m so different from this character, but I do know a lot of people like her, so it does feel familiar,” she continues. “The dancing is the thing I really had to learn. Lin and I are not trained dancers in any way, so that was the most arduous part. You see why dancers have the best bodies on planet Earth. You just pour with sweat all day.”

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Welcome to Emily Blunt Archives, a fansite dedicated to the talented actress Emily Blunt. You may know her from movies such as The Devil Wears Prada, The Girl on The Train, Sicario, Edge of Tomorrow and many more. We work to provide you with the latest news, photos, videos and more! We hope you will enjoy our site and we encourage you to visit us again to get the latest updates on Emily.

In Depression-era London, a now-grown Jane and Michael Banks, along with Michael's three children, are visited by the enigmatic Mary Poppins following a personal loss. Through her unique magical skills, and with the aid of her friend Jack, she helps the family rediscover the joy and wonder missing in their lives.

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Emily Blunt Archives is a non-profit fansite, made by a fan for fans of Emily. We are in no way affiliated with Emily Blunt nor any of her family, friends and representative. We do not claim ownership of any photos in the gallery, all images are being used under Fair Copyright Law 107 and belong to their rightful owners. All other content and graphics are copyrighted to jessica-chastain.org unless otherwise stated. If you would like any media removed please contact us before taking legal action.